Take a look there at the chart of "RCP Electoral Spread" for all of 2012. You are correct: It has been blue (Obama ahead) throughout, with just that tiny drop of red from today.

Note, by the way, their "no tossups map" http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map_no_toss_ups.html which assigns each tossup a direction. There, Obama is still ahead. We'll see if that changes as well.

I also see, by the way, that Nate Silver gives Romney an 86% chance currently of winning North Carolina.http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/I recommend that site, by the way. He may be a lefty, but he cares about reality. He annoys liberal commenters there just as often as conservative. I also heartily recommend his great book, "The Signal and the Noise". Best thing I've ever seen on how one makes predictions, and not too much intrusive math.

John, I hope you're right, but my license as a prophet expired a while back. I don't know how "momentum" works in politics, and I don't really believe anyone else does either. Just have to wait and see.

"John, I hope you're right, but my license as a prophet expired a while back. I don't know how "momentum" works in politics, and I don't really believe anyone else does either. Just have to wait and see."

You are absolutely correct, but I humbly suggest that a campaign would prefer to be expanding their map at this point in time rather than contracting it.

Iowa here. For a variety of admittedly antecdotal reasons. I cannot see Romney winnning here. Obama took the state by 9 last time. It's too much ground to make up.

I think it's still uphill for Romney overall. However b/w/o of my crude excel analysis and using the past 30 days of RCP daily averages the std. dev. of an Obama "move" is about exactly one percentage point. Romney's on the other hand, is 1.23 (or about 23% more). In short, it has been exceeding difficult for Obama to move his daily number more than 1% from a sub 50% position. Yet, for every 1% move by Obama, Romney has the opportunity to move the needle 23% more. Clearly there has been less upside potential for Obama.

Five-Thirty-Eight has both MI & PA leaning Obama while Real Clear has them as a toss-up. 538 has NC as a toss up and Real Clear has it as a leaning Romney. This leaves 538 at 237/191 Obama/Romney. It still appears pretty fluid and I expect it will be very close.

As the great Unknown pointed out, I think you mean 10 tossup states, not 131. Last time I checked there were still just 50.

I think the rout is on. In a comment on a weeks-ago post I predicted Romney by 100 electoral votes. Today's RCP map shows where he'll get them.

The only question left is whether he'll have the coattails to pull in Thompson and most, if not all, of the rest of the tossups for Senate. And he needs to hold or expand the current Republican edge in the House.

More indications getting your own base out to vote is more important than the Mighty Middle:

What’s most important for Mitt Romney is that he’s strengthening his position within his own base,” Denno said in a news release. “With the race this close, turnout is crucial. If the election had been held four months ago, some of Romney’s supporters might have stayed home. That’s less likely now.

Republicans are ticked off. they're going to show up in droves and vote for Romney just for spite.Democrats are disillusioned, and have found out that being in charge isn't as much fun as they'd hoped. They just want the election to be over so this whole BAD "dream" will go away. We may in fact see a trouncing as bad as when Reagan whupped Carter.

Scott said... More than half of Obama's electoral votes come from just three states -- California, Illinois, and New York. There is something basically wrong with that.

It is theoretically possible to win nearly 70% of the popular vote, the greatest popular landslide in history, and still lose the electoral college. Theoretically; it would never happen. Conversely, one only needs to take a simple majority in 11 specific states to get the electoral win.

There are no Obama signs in the yards this year, no stickers on the cars. Many people of good faith who voted for Obama have been bitterly disappointed in what he has done and left undone and not done at all. They will not vote for him this year. And they are very quiet about this shift.